Reducing Self-Entitlement Attitudes through Service Learning

The purpose of the current study is to explore the effects of community service work and community involvement on perceptions of self-entitlement--expectations of others to do things for oneself--among undergraduate students. Over the course of a 16-week semester, 26 randomly selected subjects (20 community college psychology students and six state university psychology students) volunteered to participate in a community service gardening program. Students were administered a pre-test questionnaire that measured their self-entitlement attitudes and attitudes addressing the importance of community service. At the end of the 16-week semester, students were administered a post-test questionnaire to assess attitudes toward their community service work. A control group (n = 26) was administered the same questionnaire, but they did not participate in community service work throughout the semester. Results were analyzed using a t-test and statistical significance was found (p less than 0.05). Results indicate that after participating in a service program, student perception of the importance of community service work significantly increased and their sense of self-entitlement decreased.